Three quick ways to instantly speed up your Android phone

Everyone’s looking for easy ways to speed up their phone, especially methods that don’t involve rooting or, well, buying a new one. Here’s three quick tips that can give you instant performance benefits.

Change your launcher

Most Android phones come with the manufacturer’s custom skin which contains additional software and functions over that which you would get from the ‘vanilla’ build of Android.

While these skins often add useful features they can also be quite large and demanding on the phone’s resources and cause it to be slowdown in the process.

Changing to a third party launcher can bring about noticeable improvements in speed, especially one of the more stripped back launchers like Nova or Apex.

These are faster and free from lag, but note that in some cases the stock launcher will continue to be loaded into memory as well.

Change multitasking settings

Delving into Android’s developer settings can bring about a few improvements to performance.

Go to Settings > Developer options and first of all turn them on to make all the options accessible. Now scroll down to the Apps section and select Limit background processes. This sets the amount of processes that can continue to run in the background.

By default the Standard Limit is what the manufacturer chooses as the best option, but you can also restrict the number, giving greater priority to the app running in the foreground. Experiment with the setting to find what works best for you.

Shorten animations

Also in the Developer options is the ability to change the animation settings for your device. This has no actual benefit to the speed of your device but can make it seem faster.

The Window animation scale, Transition animation scale and Animator duration scale all control the duration of the animations that appear as you open windows and switch between screens. The longer the duration the smoother they appear, but if you set them to be shorter (or even off altogether) the device feels much snappier.

Set the Window animation to 5x then tap the Transition animation button to see its immediate effect. We recommend .5x for all.